Search

Twelve superb paintings on silk (six pairs), each a couple making love, with one image showing faces, the other, their genitals, in each case provocatively and playfully framed to present a detail only. The paintings of each pair are linked by subtle details of clothing, sometimes suggested through a small glimpse of a pattern or a colour found in its counterpart. They are probably cuttings rescued from a refined and elegant hand scroll or hanging scroll of a larger size, wittily preserved in pairs. These are rare survivals of very high status shunga painting of the decades around 1800. The later title label on the album cover attributes them to the so-called ‘Maruyama School’ of Kyoto, but they have more in common with the sophisticated erotic silk paintings of high status artists such as Chôbunsai Eishi working around 1800. Several such paintings, on scrolls, are reproduced in the British Museum exhibition catalogue Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art (2013), see illustrations 56 and 57.

First edition in English of the Jesuit Crasset’s Histoire de l’Église du Japon (1689).

A delightful example of Japanese art of flower arrangement, ikebana, in the form of 24 ‘Rikka Zu’ (flower arrangements), with an important provenance. The arrangements combine boughs of trees or bamboo. with flowers including chrysanthemums, lotus, lilies, irises, and cherry blossom. The style is deliberately and strikingly asymmetrical, with stems tightly bundled at the foot in keeping with prevailing decorative aesthetics.

The manuscript is dated, on the first extant image, Kansei 4 (1792) July 7th and there is a further inscription to the verso of one fold, now partly obscured by a paper strip (an old reinforcement) but still legible. It reads: ‘The lord Todo Izumino-kami, when his ambassador’s mission at Kyoto had a celebration in Ryokan’ and ‘Ikeno bo’. Ikenobo was the oldest and most important school of ikebana in Japan, founded at Kyoto in the fifteenth century, while the Todo clan were an ancient Samurai family with origins in the sixteenth century. The manuscript may be considerably older than the inscription of 1792. Its style is closely comparable with a manuscript now at Cambridge, Ikenobō rikka no zu (CUL FJ.978.12) dated to the ‘seventeenth or eighteenth century’ (2223 in Hayashi and Kornicki, Early Japanese books in Cambridge University Library).

‘How to read a western clock’. This rare and ephemeral booklet comprises one printed page of text followed by 13 full-page diagrams of cherub decorated Western clock faces with Japanese zodiac symbol notations. Each clock face is left blank besides the numerals, presumably for completion in manuscript by the student. It wasn’t until 1872 that the Japanese government officially adopted Western style timekeeping practices, including equal hours that do not vary with the seasons, (and, also the Gregorian calendar). Previously the Japanese had used an (unequal) temporal hour system that varied with the seasons; the daylight hours being longer in summer and shorter in winter. This system was abolished at the start of the, 1868, The Meiji Restoration, an event that restored practical imperial rule to Japan under Emperor Meiji. The Meiji Emperor announced in his 1868 Charter Oath that “Knowledge shall be sought all over the world, and thereby the foundations of imperial rule shall be strengthened.” This modernisation led to the emergence of a western-style clock industry replacing the typical Japanese clock which only had six numbered hours, from 9 to 4, which counted backwards from noon until midnight; (the hour numbers 1 through 3 were not used for religious reasons, being the numbers of strokes that were used by Buddhists to call to prayer). The count ran backwards because the earliest Japanese artificial timekeepers used the burning of incense to count down the time.

The naive but elegant watercolours here include ginger, eggplant, hot pepper, strawberry, mulberry, lily, carnation, marigold, vetch, hypericum and orchid.